


Dance With Me, Emily

by Bredon



Category: Emily - MIKA (song)
Genre: Academia, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Robots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2017-12-14
Packaged: 2019-02-14 21:34:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13016601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bredon/pseuds/Bredon
Summary: “I think this is the one,” Emily said, just as she had said last time, and the time before, and the time before.(The last time she’d announced that she had the song, it was a treacly Edith Piaf-style torch song about Genghis Khan’s threesome with the Lady of the Lake and Spock from Star Trek, and their adventures conquering the land of glitter cheese.)





	Dance With Me, Emily

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inksmith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inksmith/gifts).



“Emily’s standing on her head again.”

I sighed, setting aside my grading and running a hand through my hair. From Fatima’s face, it hadn’t done much to straighten my general disarray, but it was the end of the semester and I had eighty finals to mark, a dissertation chapter to revise, Christmas presents to buy, and now Emily was standing on her head. 

“I’m beginning to seriously doubt my career choice,” I said, rummaging in my backpack for a granola bar. It was best not to deal with Emily unfortified.

“Aw, she’s a sweetheart,” Fatima said, unsympathetic. She dumped her armful of books on the table in our shared office. “Go on, sort out your girlfriend. Tell her I like her new song.”

Munching my granola bar, I took the stairs down from the third floor at a fast clip, dodging sleep-deprived zombies (otherwise known as undergrads) and trying to ignore the appetizing waft of coffee from the café in the courtyard outside. Emily first, and then I could refresh the thing that had once been my bloodstream (but was now flowing with pure java).

When I came through the lab door, Emily swiveled to look at me. Just like Fatima had said, she was standing on her head, and her eyes bored into me with hard curiosity. 

“Samuel,” she said, her voice hard to read. “I had calculated that you would stay in your office for the next three hours. This is a surprise.”

“Fatima said you were standing on your head.”

Emily swung down from the headstand with nonchalant grace. “Gabriela advanced the hypothesis that shirshasana revitalizes and energizes the mind. With the grant deadline approaching, I resolved to test this hypothesis on myself.” She took a thinking pose, her finger tapping her chin. “I do not yet detect any changes.”

I transferred my attention to Gabriela, a promising undergraduate, who was looking sheepish. “You taught the robot _yoga_?”

Gabriela raised her hands. “Don’t put this on me. We’re _supposed_ to be making small talk with her and helping her understand humans. I didn’t expect her to _try_ it.”

Million-dollar robot, standing on its head. Sure, Emily looked fine – self-preservation being the second command of robotic life, behind only ‘harm no human’, she would never have endangered herself. Still, it was the principle of the thing. If my PI (or, heaven forbid, a grant committee) had happened to walk in while she was trunk over hood, I would have been answering some tough questions.

“Emily,” I said, “let’s table all practical applications of yoga, martial arts, sports, and dance until Phase Two.” By Phase Two, with any luck, I might have finally graduated, and it’d be some other hapless ABD’s task to babysit this particular robot. They could teach her jujitsu or jazz, and I’d watch from afar with happy nostalgia.

Emily nodded, the dip of her head gracefully alien. “I am not detecting any change. Perhaps our minds do not experience shirshasana in the same way.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “How’s the song coming? Fatima said to tell you she likes it.”

The song. I could barely keep my tone casual when I asked. Everything revolved around the bloody song. My whole project, rashly proposed when I was a callow first-year: teach a robot to compose a pop song, and get it to chart in the Top 100.

It should have been easy (or so I’d used to think). Goodness knows there hadn’t been much originality in the pop music scene for years. Emily should’ve been able to turn out a peppy, derivative dance number in no time, mining decades of data to find the right ‘formulas’ of chords, melody, and lyrics. Oh, it wouldn’t be _deep_ , but that had never been the deal. We weren’t looking for eloquent inner pain or fundamental truths about humanity. Just popularity: effervescent, soap-bubble, ephemeral popularity. 

As a first-year writing my dissertation proposal, I’d budgeted a year to learn about the robot and program it for music, six months for the robot to compose a song (I’d thought that was ample), six months to market it and get it to chart, and a year to write up the results. Three years, meaning I’d graduate in four, or five if I stuck around campus an extra year to take advantage of the free health insurance while I submitted journal articles and went on job talks. 

Well. It was year four of the project now, which meant that I’d been in grad school for five years, and so far no hit song. My mother was beginning to seriously ask if she should renovate the basement for me to move back into. Granted, I blamed myself (first-year me had been hopelessly optimistic) and my PI (sadistic mofo liked to watch his grad students make their own mistakes and learn from them, how very dare he), more than Emily. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been trying. It was just that she was so very _bad_ at it.

“I think this is the one,” Emily said, just as she had said last time, and the time before, and the time before. 

(The last time she’d announced that she had the song, it was a treacly Edith Piaf-style torch song about Genghis Khan’s threesome with the Lady of the Lake and Spock from Star Trek, and their adventures conquering the land of glitter cheese. 

The time before that, it had been a four-chord song with eighteen verses about the evils of capitalism. We’d tried to float a trial balloon online, but apparently anarchists didn’t have time for eighteen verses of anything. 

The closest we’d come was an ode to the color pink, but I think the Stockhausen style put people off.)

But perhaps Fatima wasn’t pulling my leg this time, as the twinkle in her eye had led me to believe. Perhaps Emily finally had cracked the pop formula, as I had so confidently expected four years ago. Perhaps I’d get my first Christmas present of the year three weeks early, from the artificial lungs of a geriatric, eight-year-old university robot. Hope springs eternal.

At least it would _have_ to be better than the time she set the McDonald’s menu to a Bach-style fugue. 

“Lay it on us,” I said, and braced myself.

\---

Fatima was sitting on the bench outside the main lecture hall when I came back upstairs. She held out a coffee to me, which went a long way towards redeeming her in my eyes for getting my hopes up. 

“It wasn’t that bad,” she said, poking me in the shoulder.

Fatima’s robot had created a new insoluble math conjecture. She was finishing the final revisions on a brilliant article and sending it to the top journals in her field. When she went on the market the next year, Harvard, MIT, and Carnegie-Mellon had a bidding war over her. What I’m saying is, she couldn’t even begin to understand my pain.

“She was screaming at us in French,” I said, woebegone, scalding my tongue on the coffee.

Fatima controlled her mouth with a visible effort. “Perhaps French screaming will be a hit.”

“Pourquoi tu gâches ta vie? Pourquoi tu gâches ta vie? Pourquoi tu gâches ta vie?” I chanted, in Emily’s smooth monotone. 

Fatima tipped her head to the side, bobbing it slightly to the rhythm. “Has a bit of a beat.”

“And the accompaniment is pretty catchy this time,” I agreed, trying to look on the bright side. “If I could rewrite the lyrics myself… but that’d disqualify the whole project. It has to be Emily.”

“Emily,” Fatima said, thoughtfully.

I knew that look. It was the look Fatima got when she was about to be brilliant. (It happened a lot.) “What?”

“You’re not allowed to rewrite the lyrics or the music,” Fatima said. “Emily has to write the song, without any input from you except ‘try again’.”

“Yes.”

Fatima smiled. “So you can’t have less Emily. What about _more_ Emily?”

“That sounds…ominous.”

“Look at your dissertation proposal again,” Fatima said. “Emily has to write a pop song and get it to chart. See if there are any other restrictions. Because I have an idea.”

For the first time since a free Snickers had fallen out of the PhD lounge’s vending machine the previous week, I felt a tendril of glee unfolding under my ribs. Fatima’s ideas were notoriously awesome. I was not beyond a little friendly collaboration. Not five years into grad school.

\---

“And now for something completely different,” Ellen said. “You’ve seen the Youtube video. Who hasn’t? Here to promote “Emily,” their new single, are Sam Watkins, Fatima Gamal, and Emily the robot popstar!”

Emily got a bigger ovation than either me or Fatima, which of course we knew was going to happen. Everyone loved her. I’d thought the Santa suit had been a bit over-the-top, but from the moment Fatima’s robot Bob hacked the university’s email system and sent out our video to every single undergraduate, Emily had been a superstar. As “Emily” spread like wildfire through Twitter and Facebook, and our Youtube views started to climb into the stratosphere, the eponymous heroine had won hearts everywhere her plaintive French plea resonated.

( _“Pourquoi tu gâches ta vie? Pourquoi tu gâches ta vie? Pourquoi tu gâches ta vie?”_ played over Ellen’s loudspeakers, the peppy beat getting into everyone’s bones like magic.)

“So,” Ellen asked Emily, who sat in the seat of honor looking like a queen, “what’s it like going viral and being famous?”

“It is gratifying to reach humans with my art,” Emily said. “I had begun to hypothesize that our communication styles were too disparate.”

“How did you come up with ‘Emily’?”

“Samuel programmed me to review the entire history of twentieth and twenty-first-century pop songs,” Emily said. “Rhythm, melody, and chord were relatively simple. The quality known as ‘catchiness’ proved more elusive. It is not quantifiable.”

“I’ll say it isn’t,” Ellen laughed. “But you found it!”

“In the end, the irony of juxtaposing a self-flagellating cry of pain with a vapid dance-beat succeeded in capturing the public imagination,” Emily agreed. “The further surreal addition of the Santa costume, which I believe your culture finds to confer a materialistic festivity, led to a surprising number of humans feeling the need to share my work with others.”

“And the dancing,” Ellen said. “You’re an amazing dancer, Emily. Who wants to see Emily dance today?”

As the audience shrieked with joy, I looked at Fatima and smiled. We might have been invisible (which was the usual fate for grad students, I supposed), but the exposure had to be good for our careers. We were cutting-edge suddenly! And popular! Breaking the popular-science barrier and going from starving grad student to viral sensation almost overnight had been a heady journey. And I’d only done the programming and been a backup dancer. 

The bright lights of the TV studio shone down on Emily, dancing regally to the French cry of _why are you wasting your life?_ , on repeat as the earworm beat snaked into everyone’s bloodstream. She was perfect, and the song was surreal, and together they made an incredible whole.

Emily was a superstar, and I loved her for it.

\---

And that’s how I got my doctorate, with the help of a superstar robot, a brilliant friend, four years of hard programming work, and the unpredictable vicissitudes of global viral fame. 

I still hear “Emily” sometimes. The royalties, which belonged to the university, paid for a new robot, which we let Emily name. 

His name is Genghis, and Gabriella is currently teaching him yoga.


End file.
